Apple Buys SnappyCam Developer

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SnappyCamApple confirms the acquisition of SnappyLabs, the one-man team behind SnappyCam, an app allowing iPhone users to rapidly take high-resolution photos, for an undisclosed sum. 

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company states to Re/Code. 

The brainchild of electrical engineering PhD John Papandriopoulos, SnappyCam takes full-resolution photos at 20-30 frames per second (in comparison the standard iPhone camera app snaps at 3-6 fps). Just a couple of days the app vanished from the App Store and SnappyLabs websites went blank, raising suspicions the company had been snapped up by a major vendors. 

SnappyLabs' rapid-fire shooting technology is surely relevant to Apple's interests, and will find its way inside future iDevices soon enough. In a (now defunct) blog post Papandriopoulos explains the science inside the app. "First we studied the fast discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithm," the post reads. "We then extended some of that research to create a new algorithm that’s a good fit for the ARM NEON SIMD co-processor instruction set architecture."

Photography is a big deal within the crowded smartphone arena-- more people prefer to satisfy their creative urges (or simply indulge in selfies) with mobile devices, rather than traditional point-and-shoot cameras. 

Go Apple Confirms Acquisition of Burst Photo App Maker SnappyLabs (Re/Code)

Go Apple Acquires Rapid-Fire Camera App Developer SnappyLabs (TechCrunch)